Concern troll on tumblr who just wants childfree people to realise they're just harming themselves

[wolfpurplemoon]

I saw this guy's post in the childfree tag on tumblr and I couldn't help but respond (apparently I'm in a "correct people who are wrong on the internet" mood cos I annoyed someone on twitter yesterday on a different topic, oops!)

Natalism, Applied
It’s not a big secret that childbirth is tied inversely to wealth, or at least class. When peoples are educated and lifted out of medieval living situations, their average number of children tends to go from “a dozen” to “two or three”, which is a pretty clear result of not having to fight disease through biological redundancy. Women are no longer broodmares, and it’s possible to focus on things in life other than family. This is progress.

However, as relative class and wealth increase, happiness and meaning don’t tend to follow. White suburban families don’t tend to have many kids - those who have “medieval” levels of children are so rare we can put them on reality TV and gawk at them. We have movements of people who unironically embrace antinatalism and go on and on about the joys of being “childfree”, who see children as nothing more than burdens and time-sinks. We have, in my opinion, gone a little too far.

Remember you’re a monkey. If you want to create something meaningful, you should have a kid. If you want to be happy, try to have a strong relationship with a large family. If you want there to be a damned point to all of this progress, help bring some people out of the void to enjoy it with you!

The most frustrating thing about all of this for me personally is polyamory. Stable, lifetime non-monogamy is, at least one paper, one of the best environments you could possibly raise a kid in. With proper trust and scheduling, it can cut off the telltale fatigue of new parents in the first months, provide enough income to make one or two at-home parents possible, save on daycare costs, allow women to return to work seamlessly after maternity leave, provide a strong safety net, and give children a multiplicity of encouragement and role models. If a good single parent household is problematic compared to a good two-parent household, why shouldn’t there be some advantage to a good five-parent household?

But polyamory is generally for people in their twenties who aren’t thinking much about that kind of thing. The kind of stable, lifetime non-monogamy I’ve described here is more like polygamy, and everyone knows polygamy is evil because it’s a medieval invention for having lots of children, and we’re all so much better than that today.

@wolfpurplemoon said: “’If you want to create something meaningful, you should have a kid’ why is this rubbish in the childfree tag??”

Because arguments are pointless unless they’re spitting in someone’s eye, and while some people can be happy in the long-term without having children, believing you’re among them until you’re about 55 is hubristic. Most human beings benefit as people from having children, and nearly all children benefit from existing. This is one of those times when 200,000 years of human psychology outweighs a couple decades of personal feelings.

Not to say that anyone should be forced to have them, or that no one can be happy without them. But believing you’re not going to want kids is something people all generally feel at some point in their lives, and the existence of a movement around that idea risks rigidifying that belief and stunting their growth as people. If the movement’s large enough to be worth calling a movement in the first place, then by the law of large numbers this has already happened, and that should be as much of a problem to you as someone who never wanted to have kids being pressured to have them anyway.

i thought I was never going to have kids. I was, in fact, adamant about it. I was also a complete fucking idiot who didn’t understand what was important in life, and I was able to change my mind because I didn’t become married to a haughty label and look down my nose at the natural cycle that created me.

wolfpurplemoon:
That’s a long elaborate way to say the thing childfree people hear all the time “you’ll change your mind, I did!”

That is not true for everyone and it doesn’t stunt your growth as a person to decide you don’t want kids and then get on with your life - and a childfree movement is certainly not as much of a problem as being pressured to have kids because having kids is an irreversible decision, if someone who is childfree decides to have kids later in life there are a ton of ways they can without needing to breed themselves (fostering, adoption, looking after the children of family members).

Also “nearly all children benefit from existing”?? - have you seen all the war, disease, poverty etc in the world, not to mention abusive parents/teachers etc. In this current world we live we could do with a few less suffering people. And again, if you want to have children in your life there are less selfish ways to achieve that than insisting on spreading your own genes.

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I’m sorry a three paragraph answer is too long and elaborate for you.

The problem with creating a group identity out of something most people can advise you against is that you start seeing all criticism as persuasion. I’m not interested in sales-pitching kids to you while you roll your eyes, I’m just pointing out that your movement is harmful and why, because you asked. Choosing not to have kids is easily reversible, but making it a part of your identity or social life to be “childfree” is not, because that means changing your mind publicly, which is something most humans are atrocious at. You’re creating peer pressure where it doesn’t need to exist in order make young adults conform to a group that will cause most people to be miserable thirty years down the line.

And yes, in fact I’ll clarify: all children who don’t die before they can talk or have intense medical complications early in life benefit from existing. The really funny thing is that if you talk to a person who grew up in poverty or war or with abusive teachers, they don’t tend to wish that they’d never have existed. They’ve still read good books, smelled flowers, loved people, and had meaningful lives. People who genuinely wish they hadn’t been born are given medicine, because it’s not a natural state of affairs for our species. And fuck your complaining about suffering in the world if you’re not going to try making its next generation any better.

I never said anything about “spreading my genes” or “breeding”, although I enjoy that you can’t just say “having kids”. And there’s nothing “childfree” about adopting someone, but I’m glad you consider that an option.

There truly is no public pressure to stay childfree, if a formerly childfree person decides to have kids their entire family and their friends will be happy for them and glad they finally "changed their mind" just like they always said
And no I didn't mention adoption to make you feel better about me being childfree, I would never consider it personally
And saying breeding/spreading your genes is not to avoid saying having kids, it's to distinguish the act of insisting on having your own kids vs being open to adoption/not increasing the population of our over populated planet for selfish reasons

After discussing this with my partner, I've realised that I would respect a formerly childfree person who later decided to have children, because I know that they've considered the options and then gone in to having children with an open mind. And a vocal childfree movement allows people who may not have even considered that not having kids was an option for them to also think harder about whether they definitely want kids, which can only be a good thing.

And the thought that a childfree movement would make people feel ashamed to change their mind after previously declaring they were childfree when every other message we see is pressuring us in to having kids is just laughable. The pressure to have kids is way higher and as I said to him, you'll be embraced by your community when you finally decide to jump into the parenting life.

Ugh I need to stop replying to trolls...

EDIT: well he replied with another bunch of drivel that I have no interest in responding to *sigh*

@wolfpurplemoon replied: “There truly is no public pressure to stay childfree, if a formerly childfree person decides to have kids their entire family and their friends will be happy for them and glad they finally “changed their mind” just like they always said And no I didn’t mention adoption to make you feel better about me being childfree, I would never consider it personally And saying breeding/spreading your genes is not to avoid saying having kids, it’s to distinguish the act of insisting” … “on having your own kids vs being open to adoption/not increasing the population of our over populated planet for selfish reasons”

Firstly, I don’t know your motivation for it, but writing two replies that I have to paste into the body of my response is Twitter-essay levels of obnoxious.

Second, imagine someone who has a tight group of friends they meet through something like the childfree tag, possibly an organization or a movement or whatever you like, and they form their own social circle because they have more open schedules than people who are having and raising children. If they’re the sort of people who feel a need to identify as “childfree”, who separate themselves from the unwashed masses because they aren’t those stupid drones who overpopulate the earth and change diapers, then they’re reasonably going to stick together relative to how much they drift apart from people whose kids are now the main topic of discussion.

If one of them changes their mind after three years, it would be like telling your football team you hate football, or your drinking buddies that you’re giving up beer. This is how people lose each other socially, every day, because these identities stack up. Not to mention that admitting that your whole declaration that kids are nasty and smelly and you don’t want them was actually really dumb requires a big hit to your pride that being “childfree” has trained you to dread more than any other event you’re likely to face in the first half of your life. If the world were half as simplistic as you decree it to be, we could all rest very easy indeed, but it’s just not that way.

(Another good thing about parenthood is it imparts a sense of perspective.)

I don’t care about why you mentioned adoption, or how you want me to feel, but it’s funny that you had to put it in the record anyway. Trust me, I don’t think you’re some kind of filthy orphan-raiser. My point was only that adopting a kid gives you the same benefits of being a parent, and the kid the same benefits of having a parent, as giving birth to one. If being “childfree” includes that, it should be called “babyfree”. If it doesn’t, you apparently threw in a non-sequitur to talk about how eminently selfish it is to want to spend twenty years of your life raising another human being from scratch.

And I think I outgrew “The world’s overpopulated and bad!” by the time I was about 14. This oh-so-suffering world where crime has been declining steadily for decades, where we’re on the road to curing all our diseases, where people are being lifted out of poverty at a greater rate than any earlier point in history and where people in third-world countries can have smartphones. But at least “bad” is arguable, as long as you point vaguely to “wars” you’re sure must be happening in countries you can’t name and don’t care about. “Overpopulated” is on even shakier ground. And even if it were true that the world is overpopulated, I hate to tell you that it isn’t going to stop people from having kids, and the statistical blip of you not having one is entirely meaningless. If China’s one-child law isn’t helping, you’re not gonna be the winning goal in that particular “problem”.

Comments

[ravan]

What an arrogant ass that guy is (almost always is a guy, who never has to do the hard part.)

He's just spewing psuedo-scientic and quasi-sociological bingos, arguments that have no substance or merit.

You can lead a man to knowledge but you can't make him think. He's like a breeder robot, offended that there are people who can chose not to be programmed lemmings.

Feh

[wolfpurplemoon]

Yeah arrogant is right, he seems to think that just because he has changed his mind, that must be the only logical path or your not being a proper human.

(oh, just added his latest response to me to the post above, in an effort to stop myself responding to him :D)